Paragon Disk Wiper 10 Personal (64-bit)

By Mike Williams | 16 May 10

Paragon Disk Wiper is a useful tool that will securely delete everything on a hard drive, partition, or your drive's free space, ensuring that it cannot be recovered later. And this could come in very handy when you're selling a PC or hard drive.

The drive will almost certainly contain a great deal of information that you don't want others to see: user names, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, maybe credit card details and more. You can delete individual documents, the partition, even format the drive, but this will only remove the files from your drive's index. With the right software, the next owner of the drive could easily recover some, perhaps all of your personal data.

The program can also be used on a day-to-day basis to securely wipe your hard drive's free space. This will eliminate any remnants of confidential documents that you might have just deleted, without affecting Windows, your applications or other data.

You have to be careful with Disk Wiper - make a mistake and you could trash your entire PC - but its helpful wizards do a good job of keeping you safe. And as a bonus, you also get some useful hard drive tools, including the ability to create, format and delete partitions, set up and change drive letters, and update the drive's Master Boot Record with standard code.

Please note, this trial version of the program will let you see how it works, and the functions on offer, but these work in virtual mode only. You can't use the trial to actually wipe any files on your drive.